A beginner’s guide to the intriguing wonderland of advertising technology — Part 3

Suggested prior reading: Part 1, Part2

Image credits: adopsinsider.com

Q. How much more? This is endless. I’m growing tired!

A. Just this last one in the series. More effort put to make it enjoyable.

So far, we have covered different entities which play transactional roles in the entire landscape of advertising technology business. But what’s also important is to know the crux of how it exactly works on the granular level. Worry not, the next content is hot! (Should stop these cheesy rhymes)

AD SERVING

That’s right — ads are “served” on your browser. It’s like the side dish Romeo didn’t order, yet came along free with his sushi. He may frown if the side is a tasting sample of Alfredo pasta, but he might seriously like that if the restaurant knew that he prefers ohitashi with his sushi.

Relevance matters. Context matters. Which is exactly why information from the end user’s browser is so critical to the ad tech world. To move ahead, we need to be familiar with a couple of terms first.

1. Creative:
   A creative is any kind of ad content going to appear on the publisher website: banners, posters, gifs, videos — you name it. Yes, this is exactly what will be shown in the ad slot. The creative team in the advertising agencies are responsible for creating this content. The more eye catching it is, the better the chance of customer conversions.
2. Tag:
   An ad tag is a snippet of code that needs to be inserted within the HTML code of a webpage where an ad is due to be displayed. They are used for many purposes in display advertising, including providing the creative in a programmatic ad buy, collecting information about users who are shown ads, and generating campaign reports. (Thanks choozle.com, I probably could not have phrased it better)

The importance of ad serving technology

Direct buying of inventory was very cumbersome. The ads were hard coded on webpages by publishers every time and the advertisers paid for it. What if William needs to change his creative, it means contacting the Macbeth Ad Agency again? Ugh! William finds the effort a tad too much. So, the smart people in ad-tech invented ad servers at around the same time programmatic buying concept was at a nascent stage.

PUBLISHER AD SERVERS (FIRST PARTY AD SERVERS)

The publishers were the first ones to use this new tech and their ad servers are called publisher ad servers or first party ad servers. The earlier method of advertising was loading a hard coded creative on the webpage. The publishers then began to have pre-defined ad slots in their webpages. The webpages then made requests to the ad server, which in turn decided which creative to display in that ad slot.

Want to know who provides these publisher ad servers? DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP), OpenX, AdZerk, Zedo, Verizon Media

ADVERTISER AD SERVERS (THIRD PARTY AD SERVERS)

Since publishers started adding more user and page data in requests to first party ad servers, they could manage different campaigns for multiple advertisers and even targeted campaigns (for specific geo-locations or devices). But advertisers faced scalability challenges as in the process of running different campaigns on different publishers, as it required them to email bulky campaign files to each publisher. Another issue was the non-reliability of performance data of the campaign (e.g. How many clicks, impressions, conversions the campaign received during the flighting period).

Thus the advertisers started hosting their own ad-servers and had the publisher requests to the ad-servers redirected to these servers — called Advertiser Ad servers or the Third Party Ad servers. This gave the advertisers more control over their campaigns as the same ad could run on multiple publishers at once and the advertisers could change the creatives in the middle of the campaign. They also had access to real time and first-hand performance data. The scalability and complexity was also better handled when the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) and other groups created industry standards for file size and image dimensions.

Best advertiser ad servers? Appnexus, DoubleClick Campaign Manager (DCM), Sizmek, AdZerk, Zedo

William was now happy to change his creatives to show new diet plans to Romeo as he figured he had sold as many workout accessories as he could to him.

Q. So, what’s the difference between publisher and advertiser ad-servers and how do they work in conjunction?

Yay, my favorite part! The key difference between an advertiser ad server and a publisher ad server is that the advertiser ad server actually has stored the creatives made by the agency as well as the ad tags whereas the publisher ad server decides which advertiser will be able to advertise in the ad slots. The advertiser ad server sends information — tags and target demographics data — to the publisher ad server. The publisher ad server makes a decision based on this data.

To understand the flow, imagine Romeo is visiting amazon.com, looking for dumb-bells (We have gone back in time again). His browser makes a request to amazon.com server, which then serves the webpage containing list of dumb-bells options. The webpage also has a few ad slots — The banner on the top, skyscrapers on the left and right etc. Through Romeo’s browser’s cookie, the publisher ad server identifies his browser and understands who he is (not his personal details, mind you) and what he is looking for — A 25 year old male person in Avon looking for dumb-bells. The publisher ad server also has data from different advertiser ad servers regarding who they want to target. The publisher ad server selects an appropriate advertiser for Romeo and instructs his browser to fetch that creative from the advertiser ad server, based on the information in the tags. Through cookies, both the ad servers individually keep track of which ads were shown in Romeo’s browser and what he did with them!

ATTRIBUTION PROVIDERS

It’s quite fancy how the advertisers and the publishers started playing in millions with the advent of ad-servers. But were things all fun and games? No. There were imperfections in the system. Most importantly, the campaign performance numbers from the publisher ad-servers and the advertiser ad-server did not always match. The advertisers were, of course, charged based on the publisher numbers, but often times the buyers were not convinced.

Soon, the advertisers began hiring a new set of firms known as the attribution providers. They kept tracking the campaign performance for the advertisers and added an extra element of trust and confidence that was so much needed for smooth transactions.

Who did this tracking? Altitude by Impact, Oktopost and Nielsen.

AD SERVING METRICS

So now William thinks — his campaign was flighted, creatives were served and performance data was collected. But what do the metrics even mean?

1. Impressions: Every view of an ad on a website or an app is called an impression. Every view per unique user is called a unique impression. Every view which is completely above-the-fold is called as a viewable impression. Number of viewable impressions is crucial to the user.
2. Clicks: Every click of an ad, which takes the user to the landing page of the advertiser.
3. Actions/Conversions: This is the action that the user does what the advertiser intended them to do. When Romeo views an ad for a gym accessory, clicks on it, sees the “Buy Now” option and actually buys it — isn’t that what William wanted and invested his money in. When a reader reads my blog and accidentally clicks on some shady and subtly hidden link like this, they will be prompted to follow me — that’s what I want and my action count is incremented. That exactly is why the number of actions is extremely critical to advertisers as this is the crux of their revenue model.
4. Clicks Through Rate (CTR): This is a vital metric which gives you an idea of how your campaign is doing. It is just the percentage of the number of clicks to the number of impressions. 100 clicks generated by 10000 impressions is a CTR of 1%. If the CTR is low, it’s time to change the advertising strategy.

ETHICS IN DISPLAY ADVERTISING

I’m sure some of you must have bummed out on finding out how much user information is tracked through browser cookies. Well yes, some amount of apprehension due to “privacy intrusion” is understandable. But there are guidelines set for display advertising which the advertisers are supposed to follow:

The Institute of Advertising Ethics (IAE) lists some concise and pertinent rules that advertisers must follow when selling or marketing on the net:

• All forms of advertising material must share the common goal of maintaining truth and should be a means to serve the public
• They should maintain a clear distinction between corporate communications, press releases, sales collateral and advertisements
• A publisher must disclose every condition upfront and clearly, as the asterisks (*) and fine print at the end of the document can sometimes go unnoticed by the consumer
• If there are cookies being used to track and detect a user’s settings, personal record and online activity, then this must be clearly stated before the user begins browsing your site
• The placement of ads should in no way obstruct the user view, neither should they be disguised as editorial content
• Finally, whether you are selling on the online platforms or offline, advertisers must abide by the federal, state and local advertising laws.

The advertisers are supposed to abide by these rules. Writers at www.langoor.com opine that advertisers intruding a user’s privacy for the success of their upsell and cross-sell initiatives will not bring them long term results. Anyway, as an end user, let us always be mindful of what information you are giving away to different websites. Most of them ask for it with good intentions, but well you never know.

FINAL WORD

I hope you enjoyed reading this amateurish attempt at creating a story to help one understand display ad-tech basics. Please forgive me for any inaccuracies in the information or logical fallacies I may have made. Feel free to point them out in the responses. Any kind of general feedback is also welcome. Here’s Prateek Bhiwapurkar signing off. Blow the steam off the thought train, until we meet again. (Ugh! Stop it!)

Note: The interpretations are my own. The facts and definitions are inspired from publicly available ad-tech educational content by Google, Bizo, Infinitive and BrillMedia.co